With the exception of a small minority of children that are homeschooled, virtually all children in the United States will attend a learning institution to receive their formal education. These institutions include both public and private schools and can include preschools and daycare centers. Typically, young children attending these institutions will be dropped off in the morning by their parents and picked up by the parents later in the day after the school session has ended. Generally, the dropping off process is quite organized, as each vehicle transporting one or more children pulls up to a designated area of the facility and the driver responsible for that the children watches as they enter the building safely. In some schools or for certain grade levels, the parents park and walk the children into the facility. The difficulty, however, occurs when the day ends and the children need to be released back to the parents/guardians.
The most popular method of releasing children at the end of the school day is to simply open the door of each classroom and allow all of the children in the building or in a particular grade to make their own way out of the building. This method has its disadvantages, particularly when it comes to the younger children. For one, the children may not immediately make their way to the pickup area of the building. Second, once at the pickup area, they may not be mature enough to avoid entering the traffic lanes. This issue is exacerbated by the large number of students that are released all at the same time, which presents many distractions for these young students. In addition, there is no way of ensuring that children will not wander away from the pickup area, thereby creating traffic issues and introducing the possibility of the child being lost or even abducted.
As a measure of safety, many schools have charged the teachers or other adults within the building with the responsibility of walking groups of children to the pickup area and monitoring those children until their parent or other authorized individual, e.g., carpool driver, arrives to pick up the child. The system ensures that all the children make their way to the proper area, ensures that the children's safety is being monitored, and provides a check to ensure that the children are entering the proper vehicles.
The second system, however, has its drawbacks. For one, it is labor intensive, requiring a teacher for each class to be outside the building and constantly monitoring the drivers of the vehicles or pedestrians coming to pick up the children. It also requires an entire group of children to be at the front of the building at the same time, which is generally rather chaotic. In addition, the system breaks down when a teacher is out sick and a substitute teacher, not especially familiar with the children or their parents/guardians, is placed in charge of matching the children with the adults picking them up. Furthermore, having one person, e.g., a teacher, in charge of matching children with the parents/guardians that are there to pick them up can be very difficult when a parent has granted the authority to a third-party, e.g., the parent is ill and has asked a friend to pick up their child. In these situations, the teacher will have to spend additional time ensuring that the person is actually authorized to receive that child. Similar confusing situations are created, for instance, in the carpool arrangements where one parent will agree to pick up a plurality of children belonging to other parents participating in the carpool. This creates a number of organizational difficulties and potential breaches in security for the person in charge of properly releasing the children.
Some schools or other institutions that are particularly concerned with safety utilize high-tech systems for monitoring the safety of children while in the custody of third parties by tracking the child's location while in the custody of the third party. These systems keep records of the positional data of the child, and notify the third party and/or his or her guardians if/when the child strays into an undesired location. These communication/safety systems, however, are designed only for tracking and/or record keeping.
Some known prior-art systems automatically identify the arrival of a driver/parent on campus. These systems include recording a parent or guardian's biometric data and then electronically sending an acknowledgment of the parent's presence on campus to the supervising party once a match to the recorded data is received and identified. These known systems, however, require the parent/guardian to present themselves to the supervising party for a face-to-face encounter that causes the supervising party to direct his or her attention away from the other children. These systems further disrupt the supervising party and other children in certain situations, such as a teaching or testing environment, for example. Furthermore, as these systems are primarily based upon biometric data associated with a person that is pre-registered, it is difficult to transfer pick-up responsibilities to another person, such as an un-registered family member, friend, or someone in a car-pool, when needed, for convenience or in emergency situations.
Another known system for communicating the arrival of a driver/parent includes the vehicle generating a wireless signal that is received when the vehicle is within a pre-defined distance. The vehicle's arrival is then displayed to a set area to alert the user, assuming the user may be there. These systems require all of the children to be in front of the display and create considerable confusion in common situations, such as car pools or neighbors picking up extra children as a favor.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.